The present invention relates generally to messaging and more particularly to a messaging system and method that automatically transfer messages for display on subscriber equipment.
The trend in the telecommunications industry is toward providing a wide variety of information and communication services, or messaging services, over various communications networks to remote subscribers having diverse analog and digital telecommunications equipment. These messaging services might include voice messaging, facsimile messaging, electronic mail, electronic document interchange, interactive voice response, audio text, speech synthesis, speech recognition, video messaging, video mail, etc.
To provide these messaging services, different types of telecommunications equipment and processing protocols connect to a single host system or messaging center that provides the messaging services. The messaging center performs protocol conversions between the format employed by the messaging center and the various telecommunications formats employed by the diverse subscriber equipment.
Systems that provide messaging services over public voice networks traditionally use hardwired transceiving and protocol conversion equipment dedicated to a particular type of equipment and communications format and protocol. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from high costs and lack of flexibility and adaptability. Disadvantages arise because dedicated hardware cannot be readily modified to increase data throughput or to handle communications protocols from new types of telecommunications equipment or services. Supporting multiple types of messaging services for diverse telecommunications equipment thus requires costly module replacements and new designs for dedicated hardware.
Other systems have proposed digital signal processing and multimedia interfaces to process the communication trunk lines. One such system includes a host messaging center that supports numerous types of messaging applications and performs the necessary protocol conversions for different telecommunications protocols corresponding to various types of telecommunications media. The system uses multiple digital signal processors to perform real-time protocol conversions between the different telecommunication protocols and the protocol of the host messaging center.
All of these systems store pending messages until requested by a subscriber. The subscriber must therefore initiate the retrieval of the stored messages before the system delivers the messages to the subscriber's equipment. The subscriber might initiate message retrieval by dialing a telephone number for the messaging service and following a series of menus to retrieve the pending messages.
As a result, a need has arisen to promptly notify and deliver messages to the subscriber's telecommunications equipment without requiring the subscriber to initiate retrieval of the messages.